Tetherdown Trundlers Cricket Club

Scorecard

Tetherdown Trundlers Cricket Club v Highgate Irregulars on Sun 21 May 2017 at 2.00 pm
Tetherdown Trundlers Cricket Club Won by 48 magnificent runs

Match report Highgate Irregulars CC vs. Tetherdown Trundlers CC
Date: Sunday 21 May 2017
Status: 35 overs
Result: Tetherdown Trundlers CC (147) beat Highgate Irregulars (99/8)
(Golden) Ducksman: Shurman
Skipper: Frais
England’s green and pleasant land
FOR ITS THIRD match of 2017, the Trundlers would meet the Highgate Irregulars again, at Old Cholmelians’ ground in Mill Hill.
It is as green and pleasant a piece of land as you will find in England. Bucolic but, on Sunday, damp. Cricketing sophisticates among us wondered what this would do for carry, bounce and turn; simpler minds pondered suitable footwear.
A word about shoes. Over the winter, Shurman spent much of his pocket money at the Cricket Discount Warehouse. He came back with a helmet, thigh-pad, arm-guard, shin-pads, codpiece, chest protector and a brand-new pair of spikes.
Today, he thought he would eschew the spikes.
“When it is damp, I find they tend to sink in a bit” he explained.
Roberts looked up. “Isn’t that rather the point?”
Shurman would not be persuaded. He took the field in a pair of camel-hair pumps, hotly defending their all-round suitability.
Grays has not been to a cricket emporium: he has been to Payless Shoes1. He arrived sporting a pair of Cristiano Ronaldo “Screamers”.
Now cricket is a game of psychological gestures. A serious cricketer is appropriately outfitted. If you can project that image, you have the advantage before a ball has been bowled. Suede brothel-creepers poking out from your flannels do not create that impression. Nor do hot pink fairy boots.
Frais lost the toss. We would bat.
The Irregulars were down a man: they prayed borrow a fielder: the sorcerer’s apprentice, young Master Gordon, volunteered at once.2
Trundlers’ Innings
We know these Irregulars. They have some firepower. We are a team of timid, consensus-building husbands. Batting first against them is fraught.
Frais and Roberts opened. Frais had spoken to his upper order before he went out.
“Our watchword, gentlemen, is patience. Patience. The track will be slow. You must wait. When you have had enough waiting, wait some more. Once it has bounced, no nothing. Count to five. Slowly. Only then offer a shot.”
This made for dull reportage. Mr. Mitchell didn’t help. He bowls a tediously tight
1 “PAY LESS?? It’s Payles’s, isn’t it?”
2 Contemporaneous notes are illegible: this may say, “was volunteered at once.”
line and length. He remonstrates with himself about balls for which Grays would seek acclaim.
Roberts bore the brunt of this opening spell. He got to work on his forward defensive. Repeatedly. His first expansive shot, a clip off his toes to backward square leg, looked fence-bound until Mr. Woolard hurled himself rightward and caught it. Roberts was desolate. Fans of cricketing comedy were more sanguine, for here came Bonfield.
He affected a languid air as he strolled to the wicket – just part of the pas-de-deux between an incoming batsman and the field – but it carried through to his running between the wickets, which was lackadaisical. In answer to Frais’ urgent call, he sauntered home, and was startled at the thud of ball in glove as he crossed the crease. He wore the expression of a saloon barman during an unexpected gunfight.
A couple of balls later it happened again. Bonfield ambled. The ball zinged. Sourmash exploded on the shelf behind his head. One sensed a narrative developing.
It materialised on the next ball. Trying to work one through the covers, Frais tickled his inside edge. It dribbled down his leg. Frais knew there were runs to be had and set off at a scamper. Mr. Trevor, a capable man whose qualities do not include foot-speed, set off after it.
Bonfield accelerated with the urgency of a tanker nearing the customs kiosk at Suez. Frais turned. He thought there might be four. Five, even.
The ball was at rest inside the fine leg boundary, and Mr. Trevor had stopped for a breather.
Frais overtook Bonfield about halfway down the wicket and turned for a third.
At length Mr. Trevor regained the ball and went to return it to the keeper, to the best of his ability. It is no great ability. His throw travelled 10 feet in the air before rolling the rest of the way. To midwicket.
There, Mr. Woolard gathered it up.
Frais turned for his fourth.
Ahead of him Bonfield, still a good length short of his ground on his first run, prepared to drop anchor.
At midwicket, Mr. Woolard drew back his bow.
The Irregulars’ Mr. Hamilton is used to errant throws at his ankles. Though he has gloves, he prefers to stop things with his pads, which he will snap together, knees forward, to smother the ball. This is not “best practice” but works well enough, provided one can get to the incoming ball in the first place: when a middle-aged man throws, the target zone is huge.
Mr. Woolard, is a dead-eye shot. His throw zeroed in on middle stump.
Mr. Hamilton snapped his knees together and rocked them forward – and here we enter the world of speculation.
For at about the same moment, Mr. Hamilton’s pads brushed the back of the wicket and Mr. Woolard’s throw hit its front. It is hard to say which came first but, by all accounts, the bails were dislodged while Bonfield was yet short of his ground.
The wicket was put down. But by means fair or foul?
Bonfield is not one to rely on a technical irregularity when the substance of a
matter is not in doubt. He conceded: Mr. Woolard’s throw had beaten him, and it was a stretch to argue it wouldn’t have broken the wicket.
Besides, Gordon’s finger was up.
Out came Grainger.
The early part of his innings was as tasteful, stylish and dreary as you can imagine. It takes the intervention of outside forces to work comedy on this man’s endeavours: a child-sized bat; a Greek lady bowler; Binns – so for the time being his partnership with the equally tiresome Phillips, arrayed against the diligent line and length of Messrs. Mitchell and Gray, will get no further mention.
Soon enough, the sort of intervening agencies we like interposed themselves.
The first was the arrival of Mr. Kyriakides at the bowling crease. The dead slowness of this man’s bowling is disconcerting at the best of times. On a track like this, it invites total mental breakdown.
Phillips, at the time cantering along on 22, remembered his skipper’s words. He concentrated furiously. You could hear him practising Frais’ counsel:
“Aaaaaand BOUNCE! ONE crocodile TWO crocodile THREE crocodile FOUR crocodile FIVE - - - OOOF!”
He swung wildly.
He was still too early. So early that he had time for another go. He could have, should have and, had his eyes been open, would have had another strike at the ball when he had finished his revolution. But alas: he landed in a heap on the popping crease. The ball retained the bare minimum momentum needed to break his wicket and did so.
Buxton came in. This would not take long.
Before each delivery, Grainger walked down the wicket and reminded him to maintain his composure. His innings thus took longer than it otherwise would have. Eventually Mr. Kyriakides’ asymptotic slowness overcame his powers of self-restraint and he lofted one to Elwes at extra cover. Grainger rolled his eyes.
Still, little to animate a fan of traditional Trundlers cricket.
But ahoy there, here comes Grays! Things are looking up!
We have touched already on the psychological aspect of performance. How a confident air: a well-set chin; proper attire; a clipped baritone when requesting a guard – swagger, in other words – can tilt the playing field in a batsman’s favour.
Fat chance with Grays. In pink boots, pads on backwards, holding a borrowed bat and wearing his usual expression of papal beneficence, Grays radiated a complete absence of guile.
He adopted a peculiar stance a yard outside leg stump. This was no elaborate preparatory ritual, but his proposed striking position.
“What are you doing over there?” enquired umpire Frais. “Wouldn’t you like a guard?”
“Oh, no!” said Grays, twisting his pads around to the front. “I’ve already got some.”
“I mean in front of the wicket,” said Frais.
Grays looked nonplussed.
“Never mind. Right arm over the wicket; five to come.”
It was Mr. Kyriakides. The immovable force would meet the irresistible object.
One implication of Mr. Kyriakides’ want of pace is this: it is impossible to play his bowling behind square. Such a stroke depends upon the ball’s onward momentum and, within tolerances capable of measurement, Kyriakides’ balls have none.
Faced with this, a conventional batsman is in irons: a painted ship upon a painted ocean. He must use his own strength to shift the ball. From a conventional batting stance, this means it must go in front of the wicket.
The Irregulars’ Sunday skipper, Mr. Trevor, understands that, when Mr. Kyriakides bowls, any outfielder in the 150°arc between backward square leg and point is redundant. Being already one short in the field, he placed not one man in that vast expanse.
He had not reckoned on Grays. Having watched Mr. Kyriakides’ first ball, Grays improvised for the next, adopting an even more preposterous stance, this time a yard outside off stump, holding his bat to the right.
“What are you doing now?” asked Frais. “Are you planning to bat left-handed?”
Grays looked perplexed. “No, I’m using both hands.”
With that, Grays addressed his stance to the wicket-keeper. Mr. Hamilton took a couple of paces back.
What was he doing?
Grays seemed to be preparing to receive the ball with his back turned to the bowler.
“Are you ready?” asked Frais.
“Ready,” called Grays, over his shoulder.
Mr. Kyriakides wasn’t about to be fazed. He stepped up to the crease. Up the next one went, like a weather balloon, torpidly drifting towards Grays’ rear end. The world turned.
Grays waited. He waited and waited. He heard the ball pitch. It billowed up again. You could hear Grays counting. One … three … five …. Still he waited. He counted to ten and waited.
At last, the ball was level with him.
It drifted past, into his field of vision.
It entered the wicket’s orbit. It seemed trapped in the gravity well. There seemed to be only one outcome.
Still Grays waited.
What was he doing?
Suddenly Grays snapped into action. He launched powerfully off his right leg and clattered the ball with what would have been a handsome on-drive, were he not facing the wrong way. As it was, the ball rocketed towards the third man boundary.
Mr. Trevor, at slip, has seen many things in a long career of cricket, but he had not anticipated this.
“Bloody Hell!” he snapped, and set off after the ball.
Grays ran seven.
It would have been eight, had Grainger not aggravated last season’s buttock injury
as he turned for Grays’ last push.
Phillips was re-padded and sent out to run for him. Even with Grays as a partner, this sequence lacked spicy anecdote.
Grainger toughed it out, but the revelation was Grays: for him, runs kept coming. A nudge to point here, a swipe to midwicket there, another blistering cover drive to backward square leg, at every encounter confounding Mr. Trevor’s best laid plans. Being somewhere between insouciant and plain ignorant of the strategies for effective batting, you wouldn’t call it a calculated innings, but it was getting under Mr. Trevor skin all the same.
Yet an untalented batsman has no obligation to surrender his wicket on aesthetic grounds. It wasn’t Grays’ fault the opposition’s tactics were too clever for him.
Deep down, Mr. Trevor knew this. Given his own modest batting acumen, it would be dissonant to hold another view. He transferred his exasperation to the quality of Grays’ running between the wickets. It upset him greatly.
An experienced batsman knows not to tread on the sacred strip between the stumps. Grays, clad in winter springs, did not, and was ploughing large furrows on a good length every time he turned.
To be sure, this was inadvertence rather than mendacity on Grays’ part. With career total of 18, accumulated at an average of 2.5 and over five years, Grays has never had an innings long enough to know any better. By the end of this one, he had doubled his all-time total, and balls pitching on a good length were spitting like firecrackers.
The Trundlers’ total progressed steadily through the offices of this unlikely partnership: a threesome between Grainger, Phillips and Grays. Our projected score looked light, but considering what was left of our batting it would have to do.
All good things must perish, and so did this spine of Trundler resistance, with ten overs left. Grainger got through a drive too early. Mr. Elwes took another sharp catch. Plimley made his way to the middle.
One hundred and thirty for six: just Shurman and the family Gordon left to bat. When Grays pushed aerially to point and was caught, Mr. Trevor signalled the kitchen to prepare for an early lunch. A wise man. Out trotted Shurman, in his slip-ons, wind-milling his bat.
Gordon senior, at that time substitute fielding for the Irregulars, was under no greater illusion. He would need to pad up, and sharpish. He motioned for Buxton to replace him in the field.
Mindful of his reporting duties and aware that some knockabout entertainment was surely due, Buxton accepted at once.
Having reverted to his mean in his previous innings, Plimley stuck with it in this one. He could not reproduce his expansive stroke-play from the Maidens’ game. Mr. Singh bowled a short away swinger which diverted sharply off a Grays furrow and collected Plimley on the elbow. This drew a stifled cry from Mr. Singh: most likely this was an expression of exasperation for a ball which didn’t go where he intended, but it was not impossible to construe it as a choked appeal.
Umpire Bonfield did so and immediately upheld it.
“As you know,” Bonfield explained to an exercised Plimley, “No one is more reluctant to give L.B.W.’s than me.” Plimley made some remark about Making Umpiring Great Again, and quit the playing arena.
Out came Gordon senior. The kitchen went on high alert.
Before Gordon could face his Waterloo, Shurman deprived us of our first chance to see just how suitable those suede brogans would be for cricket, for on his first opportunity to use them he kept them rooted to the spot, dangled his bat outside off stump, and saw his middle one pushed back.
Now Gordon the younger joined his father in the middle. It wasn’t clear who was shielding whom from strike. The old man clattered one through extra cover, looking grateful to achieve the non-striker’s end, but his son was even eagerer and called him back for two.
Suspecting there might be exploitable flaws in Gordon’s technique, Mr. Trevor motioned his substitute fielder, Buxton, to come in to short midwicket.
At this moment, Plimley hailed Buxton from the side.
“I say, Bucko, do you fancy being relieved?”
“At the end of the over,” hissed Buxton, conscious that this interruption might be interfering with his adopted team’s concentration.
“No! No! Go now!” cried Gordon. “You’ve had a good old go. It’s Plimley’s turn.”
Buxton comes up short in many respects as a cricketer, but he can hold a catch. Yet this casts unfair aspersions on Plimley’s co-ordination: he is a prolific catcher too.
Buxton promised, again, to leave at the end of the over.
It will not require clairvoyance to guess what happened next.
Now offering the opposition a substitute fielder is, in any weather, a gregarious act. An opposition skipper can hardly look such a gift horse in the mouth, as long as it is not actively Trojan in attitude.
But only a fool would expect to be overwhelmed by such a substitute’s performance. His pursuit of a ball towards the fence will be half-hearted. He might take an extra step before releasing his throw if a run-out is on the cards. He will let it fly short and wide of the keeper. One expects these things: a beggar can’t be a chooser. Likewise, the donating skipper will expect his man to apply something less than every fibre of his being to fielding effort.
But the substitute cannot be an outright saboteur. There are limits. Gordon tested them at once. He ladled the ball to Buxton’s midriff at so lazy a velocity that anything other than a clean catch would have seemed positively pernicious. As the ball looped, Mr. Trevor conspicuously cleared his throat. Buxton got the message.
The innings this finished, the Gordons marched from the wicket arm in arm, the younger one beaming from ear to ear at the thought of his admirable nought not-out.
Irregulars innings
SEEING AS THE Irregulars had scored more in our midweek 20 over game, defending 147 over 35 overs seemed a tall order. But the Trundlers quickly found a containing
line and length. The opening pair were obliged to take chancy singles to move their total on at all.
This tactic did not take long to come a cropper, though as usual there would be some Trundler misadventure about it. Mr. Mitchell, aiming to drive, got a thick edge down to Shurman. Mr. Woolard, backing up assiduously, called a run. Having observed Shurman in his moccasins skating around the damp patch at third man the previous over, he had concluded that here was a fielder who could profitably be pressured.
Shurman did not wilt. He fielded cleanly, planted his front loafer and made to rifle it to the bowler’s end, correctly observing that, of the two, the striking batsman had more ground to cover. Mr. Woolard, running away from the danger end, eased his pace.
As Shurman let fly, his hushpuppy slid sideways. He toppled forward and would end up face-down in the mud but, before he got there, he let the ball go. It flew at 45 degrees to is intended direction. Grainger, ready to put down the bowler’s wicket, began a vigorous denunciation, but was halted when the ball broke the other wicket, Mr. Woolard still a foot short of his crease. Shurman, naturally, accepted his team’s congratulations and trusted this settled the question of his footwear.
The remainder of the innings was short of reportable comedy incident. All the Trundlers bowlers were misers. Five of them conceded fewer than 4 an over. Gordon senior was the revelation and, had he not spilled a sitter on the last delivery of his spell, would have ended with figures of 7 overs, 4 wickets for 11 runs. But 3 for 11 was a fine haul. The irregulars lasted their 35 overs, for a total of 99, with eight out of a possible nine wickets down. It being yet to strike five, Frais decreed a total communications lockdown and thoughts quickly turned to refreshment.

Tetherdown Trundlers Cricket Club TTCC 1st XI Batting
Player Name RunsMB4s6sSRCtStRo
extras
TOTAL :
10w 3lb 
for 10 wickets
13
147		        
Adam Frais ct Elwes 19 19 3 100
Justin Roberts ct Mitchell 4 14 28.57
Duncan Bonfield run out (Woolard) 6 14 42.86
Steve Phillips b Kyriakides 22 12 4 183.33
Guy Grainger ct Singh 38 38 100
Olly Buxton ct Kyriakides 13 13 1 100
Rob Grays ct Patel 24 25 2 96.00
Jon Plimley lbw Singh 5 8 62.50
Morley Shurman b Patel 0 1 0
Marcus Gordon ct Patel (by Buxton) 2 4 50.0
Sam Gordon Not Out  0 3 0

Highgate Irregulars Bowling

Player nameOversMaidensRunsWicketsAverageEconomy
No records to display.

Highgate Irregulars Batting
Player name RMB4s6sSR
extras
TOTAL :
2nb 6w 1lb 
for 8 wickets
9
99 (35.0 overs)		     
Mitchell b Gordon M 29
Woolard Run out  4
Singh ct Gordon M 17
Ramani b Gordon M 0
Elwes b Frais 1
Trevor ct Shurman 15
Patel b Buxton 22
Hamilton ct Gordon S 5
Gray Not Out  2
Kyriakides Not Out  0
   

Tetherdown Trundlers Cricket Club TTCC 1st XI Bowling

Player NameOversMaidensRunsWicketsAverageEconomy
Olly Buxton6.0311111.001.83
Guy Grainger7.011200.001.71
Adam Frais7.0024124.003.43
Marcus Gordon7.001133.671.57
Sam Gordon6.0022122.003.67
Morley Shurman2.0024124.0012.00